Northampton County eyeing Forks Township site for archives building for $2.2 million

View full sizeExpress-Times Photo | NICK FALSONENorthampton County Executive John Stoffa wants the county to purchase this building at 999 Conroy Place in Forks Township and convert it to house the county's archives.

Stoffa is recommending the county acquire the 9,750-square-foot building located at 999 Conroy Drive for $750,000. The building was appraised at a value of $725,000 last July, Stoffa said, but the owner, whom he did not identify, originally asked for $799,000.

Tax records show the building is owned by Edwin Stipe III and Henry L. Scherer.

County administration presented a purchase agreement for the site to Northampton County Council on Friday afternoon.

Stoffa said the building, which has existing office space, bathrooms and is in move-in condition, would be used to store thousands of boxes of paper documents such as homicide case files, tax records, blueprints and deeds.

The Northampton County Archives building was demolished in 2004 to make way for an expansion of the Northampton County Prison. No new archives building was constructed and the county is currently paying $125,000 a year to store 18,260 cartons of documents at Iron Mountain, an information services company in Allentown.

More documents are stored at the Northampton County Courthouse,
Gracedale, and the Governor Wolf and Bechtel buildings, among others,
Stoffa said.

In order to get the building up and running, Stoffa said it would cost approximately an additional $1.5 million to install the heavy duty shelves and climate control necessary to store the documents, many of which only exist in paper form.

That money would also provide start up funds for a digital archives system, he said. Several counties in Pennsylvania are moving toward a digital system and it would make the archives more efficient and accessible to the public, Stoffa said.

Under the existing system, people must wait several days before they can review historical documents they request because it is stored offsite in many cases.

"It gives information back to the people," Stoffa said.

Stoffa identified the acquisition of an archives building as one of his priorities entering this year and $852,000 has been set aside in the 2012 budget for the purchase and renovation of the site, he said.

Moving out of the Iron Mountain storage space would go a long way toward closing the rest of the funding gap, he said.

"In five or six years, you can have this building paid for," he said.

Council President John Cusick agreed, saying the rent at Iron Mountain is more expensive than the money the county brings in through its Record Improvement Fund. By buying now, while the market is weak, the county has an opportunity to cut its expenses in the medium- to long-term, Cusick said.

Cusick said he intended to support the project, which would be formally introduced to council Thursday.

"I think the arrangement we currently have is a great deal for Iron Mountain and bad one for the taxpayers on Northampton County," he said, adding the county's records belonged within Northampton County.

At last week's county council meeting, Councilman Lamont McClure said he wouldn't support the archives building after council voted to completely buy out a $25 million swaption. He stood by that promise Friday afternoon, saying the county was spending money too quickly between the swaption, the West Easton treatment center and discussed improvements to Gracedale nursing home.

By continuing to spend money, McClure said the county was limiting its ability to avoid a tax increase in 2013.

"I think we need to take a couple of years before we start spending money on other things that are not necessary. We need to focus on certain things," McClure said.